Sunday, 21 July 2013

Sabrina is a fairytale love story set around themes of rivalry and
class. Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn) is a chauffer’s daughter, living on a
large Long Island Estate. For some time she’s been in love with the rich and
careless David Larrabee (William Holden) who barely notices her. After two
years studying in Paris,
the grownup Sabrina returns a beautiful and sophisticated woman and David falls
in love. The couple’s relationship threatens to derail a big merger for the
family company so David’s brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) decides to woo the
girl himself before packing her back off to Paris.

This film is one of several in my
girlfriend’s DVD collection that I’ve been meaning to watch for a while.
Hepburn is her favourite actress but it was Sabrina
I chose over other films because of the male stars. I’ll happily watch anything
Bogart and Holden are in but have to say that I was a little disappointed with
this film. The stars failed to gel on screen and a little reading tells me that
Bogart was unhappy for the duration of the shoot with both director Billy
Wilder and his co-star Hepburn who he believed needed too many takes to get her
dialogue right. There was better chemistry between Holden and Hepburn which
isn’t surprising as the two began a brief affair while shooting the movie.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Sunset Boulevard
is a multi award winning 1950 melodrama which turns the camera on Hollywood and tells the
story of a faded silent movie star’s relationship with an ambitious but
unsuccessful young writer. Nominated for eleven Oscars it is often regarded as
one of the greatest films ever made and appears on numerous Top 10 lists. In
1989 it was selected as one of the first films to be preserved in the National
Film Registry and today, over sixty years after its release it continues to stand
up thanks to its excellent writing, direction, performances and Noir sensibility.

Joe Gills (William Holden) is a struggling writer in search
of a job. He has little success and with debt collectors on his tail he drives
into the seemingly abandoned driveway of an old Sunset Boulevard mansion. He
soon discovers that the decrepit house is in fact occupied by a former movie
star called Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and her mysterious butler Max (Erich
von Stroheim). After initially being mistaken for an undertaker, Joe announces
himself as a screenwriter and the former star puts him to work rewriting her
screenplay with the hope that it will rekindle her career. Desmond, it soon
turns out, is living in a delusion and cannot grasp that her time has been and
gone while Joe uses his time in the house to further his career.